Draft Transcript
2012 National Disability Award winner
Draft Transcript
Vice-Chancellor’s Address to the University
Held at UWS, James Ruse Drive, Parramatta
Friday, 6 June 2015 at 3pm
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2012 National Disability Award winner
VICE-CHANCELLOR BARNEY GLOVER: Welcome, everyone. It's great to see
so many here in Parramatta and hopefully we have a number of people
livestreaming this presentation this afternoon. So it's great to have hopefully a
good cross-section of the university community listening in or participating
here in the audience. So thanks very much for coming along.
As is our practice, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional
owners of the land on which we're meeting, the Darug people, and particularly
acknowledge their elders past, present and future and of course any Aboriginal
or Torres Strait Islander people who might be here today in Parramatta or
listening in and watching via livestream. It's great to be here. Thank you
very, very much for coming along.
What I want to do in the course of what I hope will be about 40 minutes
of presentation from me is to give you a snapshot of the state of the university
as I see it midway through 2015, and on the basis of what has been an
exciting 18 months since I became Vice-Chancellor at the beginning of 2014, I
thought it was timely to connect with the university. One of the great aspects
of our university is its distributed nature and our multi-campus environment,
but that does from time to time present some challenges to get out to people
and to have a conversation about the university, the sector that we're part of
and the strategic direction we're taking. So hopefully today will be the first of
a number of addresses to staff that I do in this fashion, and we'll try to use not
just the livestream technology but other technologies in the future. Last year
we tried Yamma chats and other things, so we'll continue to work on
communication.
I should say that at the outset we've seen some early results from the
My Voice survey that staff completed over the last month or so. 86% of staff
participated. It was quite an extraordinary result in the end, well above the
sector average when it comes to a repeat My Voice survey. Normally it's about
a 60% response rate the second time around. We got 86%, which is great.
The early results I must say I'm very, very pleased with in terms of the change
in the organisation that has been identified since 2012 and that's very positive.
There are still a number of things for us to focus our attention on. I'm also
pleased that the early indications are that communication within the
organisation is improving, which I'm pleased about. We put a lot of effort into
that, both out of my office directly but also amongst the senior executive. So I
look forward to discussing the My Voice survey in a lot more detail with you
over the course of the next couple of months and then we'll enter into no
doubt some deeper discussion about what we do about those areas that it's
identified where we need to pay more attention.
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2012 National Disability Award winner
So what I want to do is to go through a few slides. I want to give you a
snapshot of where the university is at the moment, as I said, I'll try to give
some sector-wide perspective as we go along, and then to look forward to
what I think might unfold in the course of the next year or so in particular.
Bear in mind that from the higher-end reforms aspect of higher education in
Australia at the moment, those reforms remain bogged down in the Senate.
By all indications that won't change, but anything is possible, and I imagine
that the legislation, according to the Minister, will go back to the Senate for a
vote probably I imagine in August this year. If it's defeated, it will be the
second time that legislation has been defeated, and it seems that the intention
of the Government is to have yet another double dissolution trigger if it wants
to use it.
I doubt whether the negotiations that are no doubt going on with cross
benches will be successful, so I think we can anticipate that this package will
not get up, which means in terms of planning for 2016 and possibly for 2017
it's business as usual in terms of the funding arrangements that the university
has at present and that's a positive thing. But nevertheless we still have
hanging over us an election in 2016, and no doubt I imagine the Government
will take to the election its reform agenda in higher ed, there's absolutely no
indication they'll back away from it, and in that context we'll be looking to what
the opposition has to say.
As I said yesterday at the professional staff conference and I'll repeat
here, one of the very good things about the last 12 months in Australia in
relation to higher ed is it has become an election issue. The polling, or at least
the surveys that Universities Australia have been doing, show us that the
people, the community, are deeply interested in higher education, they're
deeply interested in the sustainable funding of our universities, deeply
concerned about any suggestion that universities, that higher education or that
research is under threat. So from that perspective there is a very strong sense
of support for the sector within the community.
The deep discussions that have gone on around the reform agenda in the
last 12 months and the concerns that have been expressed about it in the
community indicates that it will be an issue I'm sure the opposition will be
deeply involved in in the lead-up to the election and I'm sure the Government
will no doubt equally be engaged in debate about the future of higher
education, but at least it will be an election issue, which is great, and that
gives Universities Australia and UWS and other universities an opportunity to
judge both sides of the political debate in terms of how their policies will
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provide the sort of stability and the adequate funding that we need and the
affordable high-quality higher education we need in this country alongside, of
course, some commonsense around long-term sustainable funding for
research. So in that context, the next 12 months is going to be interesting,
interesting to be the Chair of UA and interesting to be the VC at UWS.
Now, in terms of 2014 and 2015 for us, one of I think our big
achievements in the last 18 months has been our new strategic plan, Securing
Success. That's a snapshot of it, of the pillars of Securing Success, and of
course the central aspect of our plan, which is to be a distinctively
student-centred university. I'm very pleased that the language of Securing
Success has been picked up around the university. I'm very impressed with
the responses to it that I've had both in the process of developing the plan, but
more importantly since it was endorsed by the Board of Trustees in February.
Since then of course the implementation that needs to go on to bring some
reality to our objectives that's under way reflects the fact that people are
getting behind it, and I do appreciate that.
It's going to be a plan, as I said at the time, that's not simply something
that we park and come back to once a year and say, "Well, how have we
gone?" It's got to be something that we live and breathe. We've got to look in
detail at the objectives within it, the sub objectives, the targets and the
measures, and so on, and ensure that we're working diligently to implement
this plan.
I know that Scott Holmes has his research plan out, Linda Taylor has
been talking about the internationalisation plan, I know that Denise Kirkpatrick
is working on what will be our teaching and learning and academic plan. So all
of those components will come together. Schools and divisions will have action
plans that reflect Securing Success, so from my perspective we're heading very
much to have the architecture that goes around Securing Success in place this
year, and certainly that will be the cornerstone of our implementation of our
plans over the course of the next two or three years.
It's not set in stone of course because we will come back to it on an
annual basis to make sure that the plan is reflecting the direction we want to
take, but nevertheless I think it has set a course for 2020 for us.
Now, I think it's appropriate at times like this to engage in a discussion
around the financial position of the university, and this particular slide
illustrates that at the moment we are projecting an overall operating result for
the year of a surplus, a modest surplus of about $23 million. That's a little less
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than the surplus that we initially projected for 2015, and the reason for that in
part is that the Board of Trustees has endorsed a strategy for us to
significantly increase our investment this year in marketing and in the branding
of the university and our brand positioning, particularly in western Sydney,
something that I'll say a lot more about over the course of the next couple of
months.
One of the things that I've found interesting and slightly surprising over
the course of the last year is the depth of quality within UWS, which I find
everywhere I go, and yet we are not saying enough about it in promoting the
institution broadly into the community. If we don't lift that awareness level, if
we don't lift not just our brand profile but lift the profile of our product, of our
courses and programs, broadly into the community, then we will continue to be
subjected to some of the challenges we have from a very competitive higher
education sector in New South Wales, let alone in the international context in
recruiting students. So having made that decision to invest significantly this
year and over the next two years in marketing, that means I'm pleased to say
we're still maintaining an important but relatively modest surplus.
You can see that we're already ahead this year to date. Don't take a lot
of notice of the numbers there because they fluctuate a great deal during the
course of the year, but the early indications are that revenue is about on target
and our expenditure pattern is coming in under budget at the moment.
Certainly in talking to the Deans and to the DVCs and Vice Presidents, we'll be
working on ensuring that we do invest in our future, so we won't be holding
back on expending our budgets during the course of 2015. But in terms of the
overall position, it's a sound financial position for the university.
But I did want to go a little more deeply than that. The university does
borrow, and I wanted to get a sense of our exposure to debt. Now, that's not
surprising for a university. In fact, if people would like to know more about
the financial health of our university - and we are a healthy university - then
I'd encourage you to have a look at both our annual report and also the
Auditor General's report on New South Wales universities which was released
only in the last few weeks. I think the Auditor General's report in particular
compares all New South Wales universities over a range of indicators and in
this year's report has made some interesting observations about the health of
the system, certainly indicating that New South Wales universities by and large
are in a good financial position, but nevertheless indicating that there are some
tensions in the funding arrangements that are of concern to the Auditor
General.
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We have very modest borrowings, and you'll notice it's due by the end,
or at least forecast for this year to be about $100 million worth of total
borrowings, but projected to decline to about $44 million over the course of
the next two years. Just to explain why that's occurring, we're coming off a
large number of very substantial construction capital program and projects
across the university and from that perspective it affects our debt regime.
But also importantly we made a decision to defer some projects in our
capital program to look to invest particularly in technology and our technology
rollout, our technology vision, just in particular because of One Parramatta
Square, which I'll talk more about, but to in a sense future-proof the university
over the next couple of years so we have plenty of liquidity to respond to any
sort of challenge we might see, particularly in the context of what might have
been at the time we did that a deregulated environment. So I've given you
the web addresses there to get a sense of those plans and the Auditor
General's report.
Student load - we've had some interesting trends this year in student
load and I think it's worth reflecting on them because it does highlight the
challenging aspects of the University of Western Sydney both in the immediate
term, but also in the longer term. These numbers are certainly showing us
that we are a robust large Australian university by any measure. However,
there are some things here to note.
One is if you compare our total load, excluding UWS College, between
2014 and our current estimate in 2015, total load is actually quite flat for the
university, and that's projecting what we can in mid-year enrolment. In fact,
at the moment our load is under by several hundred EFTSL on our target at the
March 31 census date, so that's a concern to us. It's distributed across a
number of programs. Some courses are doing well. In some schools other
courses are under some pressure. So it's a mixed bag when it comes to our
current position. Overall, though, we are a little down on domestic load for the
University of Western Sydney, excluding the college.
The college, on the other hand, is booming at the moment. It's up about
1,000 students this year compared to last year. It has introduced an open
access four-term diploma program that's doing remarkably well. We're looking
in more detail now at data about the success of the college as a pathway to
the university and it's remarkably successful in addressing what might be
described as the educational disadvantage reflected in an ATAR gap - very
important information for us to have in the context of the next 12 months
leading into an election about the value of these sorts of pathway programs.
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The other thing to note in relation to this is that international students
are up a little bit for the university, but actually that's continuing load. Our
commencing load is down for the university this year by about 7% and down in
the college. That is a concern to us and one of the issues that we're facing
with international load at the moment is some challenging circumstances with
streamlined visa processing, the management of visa refusals, fraud
internationally in terms of visa applications and so on. These are small
numbers in the context of the number of students coming to the university,
but they affect our risk rating. So we've had to make some changes there in
order to manage that risk and there is a consequent impact on our load.
We are beginning to pick up from that point, but I think it illustrates that
from the load position there are some challenges for us, and I'm very pleased
that deans are responding to some of those challenges in the domestic context
and Linda is doing a great job in the international space. We have new
programs coming online and I'm confident that we'll meet our targets over the
next few years, but nevertheless there are some challenges.
I did want to reflect also on retention rates, another indicator we watch
very, very carefully on the available data. You can see here that our retention
rates remain below the sector average and that's a concern to us. We actually
retain students in the sector fairly well, but we do have students who begin
with us and don't finish with us.
They go to other institutions, UTS Macquarie, wherever they might go - and that does impact on our overall
retention rate. We are doing a lot about that. Part of our marketing campaign
is not simply about attracting new students, but also reinforcing the quality of
programs to our existing students. So there is work to be done. Interestingly,
that moved upwards a little bit in 2013/14.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander numbers - I did want to reflect on
this, I think this is an area where the university hasn't done well enough.
We're in the market at the moment to recruit a pro Vice-Chancellor Community
Engagement and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership and we're
hoping to make an announcement about that position in the near future. You
can see the numbers here. The 2015 numbers for the university at this stage
are down a little on 2014, although percentage wise it has gone up.
Promisingly, in our pathway programs through the college we're seeing quite a
significant increase, but off a small base in terms of the number of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander students.
It's an area I've been talking to the Deans about. I'd like to see us do
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more to be seen as a university of choice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander students in western Sydney. Interestingly, as the Chair of UA, at my
first meeting with Christopher Pyne we ranged over a number of issues, but at
the end of the conversation he asked that in the next meeting I have with him
we address at the beginning his concerns about Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander higher education. So he's interested in it, the sector is interested in
it, and I think there is more that we can do to be seen as an institution of
choice, and these numbers I think illustrate that. I'm sure our new Pro
Vice-Chancellor working with Denise will be closely involved with our schools
and the college to ensure that we can in fact turn that around - equally in
terms of the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff that we've
attracted to the university and that we retain.
I touch on the college performance again. This very stellar performance
this year is coming off a number of years of very steady growth for the college.
The college is, like most parts of UWS, very innovative in the way it designs its
programs. I must say that the way it delivers its programs is equally
innovative and certainly demonstrating that with small class sizes and the
high-quality teaching programs that it has in place, you can in fact not only be
seen as the pathway of choice, but in fact deliver great outcomes for those
students who are moving through the college and into the university. So those
numbers are very important and very important to underpinning our financial
position as an institution.
I should say this year we've also established a University of Western
Sydney International College, a joint venture with Navitas, which is due to
begin later this year, and that's to enable us to take the great success story of
the college and replicate it as an international pathway using the outreaching
capability of Navitas around the world with its very extensive high-quality
agent network and recruitment network to bring increasing numbers of
international students into our English language programs and into our diploma
programs.
Those of you who saw the Four Corners program a few weeks ago will
know that agent-based recruitment is under some pressure in Australia at the
moment.
There has been a Productivity Commission report questioning
agent-based recruitment, or at least the level of it, and the potential for it to
be exposing universities to risk. The ICAC report equally highlighted some
concerns around agent-based recruitment, and of course Four Corners raised
some questions about certain agents.
I can assure you that we're very, very aware of those concerns. We're
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looking for ways to diversify the university's recruitment practices away from
total reliance on agents, as it almost is at the moment, to increasingly work on
institutional relationships overseas as the mechanism for attracting
international students inbound to the university, but I'll come back to that
point.
The Academy - I think one of the great success stories. I think at the
moment we have about 1,600 students in the Academy. It has grown
dramatically in its first couple of years. Angela Curtis and the team and James
Arvanitakis have done a fabulous job, a job of developing what is an
increasingly attractive program for students, particularly high ATAR students,
of course, in Western Sydney. I'm sure that this is going to go from strength
to strength, and certainly when I'm out and about in Western Sydney talking
to people about our success stories, they want to know more about the
Academy and how they can get involved with it.
I did want to talk about blended learning and online learning to give you
a sense of where we're at. It has been a major investment by the university
through the Our Future program, which we're now mainstreaming this year. In
recent years we've made great progress in terms of the number of units which
are now fully blended, 65%, and we're working towards 100% by the end of
this year. This particular slide gives you some indication of how we're going
across our various schools.
In the last few days we had a Board of Trustees meeting and a Board of
Trustees strategy day. Denise presented at that strategy day about how we're
responding to the disruptive nature of technology in higher education. That
was very interesting to the board. They also had some hands-on experience
from a presenter from Apple about how Apple sees the world of higher
education in the future with technology and some of the challenges that are
emerging. No doubt about it we're not leading the world on blended learning,
we're catching up quickly for the most part, and there's a lot more we need to
do. And of course the whole concept of where blended learning engages with
the online area is important to us, and I'll come back to that.
This particular slide was just to indicate new course approvals as one
indicator of what we're trying to do to increase the programs we're offering,
particularly post-graduate programs, influenced to some extent by AQF, so
we've had to approve a number of programs at the postgraduate level to meet
new AQF requirements. But nevertheless we are deeply involved in ensuring
our programs meet the needs of industry and business and the community
broadly, something that we need to keep in mind about the ability for our
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programs to meet the work force requirements for our students. But I'm very
pleased that we're developing our suite of programs and product more broadly.
I did want this presentation also to touch on some of the very important
awards that we're winning - tonia Gray and her award, an Australian award for
university teaching, and a number of other awards. This university's history in
being highly successful in attracting awards of excellence in teaching and
learning is well known in the sector and certainly admired widely. We want to
continue that trend into the future. So it's great to see in 2014 we continued
to have success, and I'm sure we will have well into the future.
I did want to touch on UWS Online briefly - probably a disappointing
outcome to some extent this year in terms of the number of students. 79
students at the census date that were enrolled in our programs, and this gives
you a sense of where they enrolled - very small numbers for the most part, a
couple of programs quite viable. I think we're learning a great deal about
online and how to enter the online space, and I know Denise at the moment is
heavily involved in rethinking our online strategy and how that relates to
blended learning and, more importantly, to the university's programs more
broadly.
So I don't think we should necessarily be totally disappointed about it. I
think we've learned a great deal. Without a doubt we need to have an online
presence and we need to ensure that we're offering product that's attractive in
the marketplace. We need to understand some of the dynamics going around
enrolment in online programs. There's more that we need to learn in that
space.
But we're very committed to this journey. We'll be much more focused I
think going forward in the courses and programs we offer in a fully online way.
I think it's very important that our Bachelor of Communication program, as an
example, in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, we designed
that ourselves, it's not an Open University UK program, and offered it and it
has been a great success. I know that one of the questions I was asked for
today was really to reflect on well, do we want to develop more of our own
product or do we want to use more of the Open University UK product. I think
that there's some very good reason for us to be focusing on our own product
and ensuring that it's available in a broad range of modalities and
synchronously and asynchronously. So, in that context, I'm certainly looking
forward to more courses like that emerging.
Student satisfaction - this was just to give you a sense of how we
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continue to rate on the various measures in the university experience. A
survey for last year and overall, 84.4% course level satisfaction, and we've
been ahead of the sector now since 2009, so that's great to see. We'll be
monitoring those indicators, as we always do, very, very carefully, but
certainly reflecting a high level of satisfaction, but work to be done.
Scott is not here today.
I'm sure, though, Scott, you're online
somewhere watching in, I'm sure of it. He is, yes. He has done a huge
amount of work over the last 12 months in research and I'm very pleased with
the range of initiatives that we have launched in 2014 and into this year.
This is just a sample of them. Centre for western Sydney, which we
launched last year with the Premier in Penrith, which is now undertaking some
dedicated work, research work, around the future of western Sydney in some
specific areas, whether it's innovation in advanced manufacturing or whether
it's affordable housing or whether it's urban living into the future, whatever it
might be, to see the university taking a very strong role in publicly discussing
some of the challenges facing Greater Western Sydney.
REDI, of course, which is increasingly our outreach into business and
industry to try to attract funding in. One of the key strategies I spoke about
last year was the need to diversify the sources of income we receive to drive
our research effort, and REDI is part of Scott's response to that and the team
are doing a great job in bringing resources in other than from national
competitive research grant sources, which we continue of course to be very,
very involved with, but we need to recognise it's a very competitive space.
The Ideas Lab; Research Week, which was a success last year and is
being repeated this year; the relationships, strategic relationships, with a
number of companies and organisations that we're developing.
The Gateway of course, which now works very closely with REDI as a
portal for people who want to engage with the university to come through that
portal so that we can better manage some of those relationships. James
Arvanitakis is now running the graduate research school, and we established
that as a way of focusing our attention on postgraduate research to make sure
we're supporting our students appropriately.
We've entered the Easy Access IP domain along with many other
universities quite appropriately. What we're trying to do to improve grant
application processes, reviewing for example at the moment the Office of
Research Services, our operational planning and some innovation mapping
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we're doing on Western Sydney to see the hot spots of innovation in Western
Sydney. They're just a touch of what we're doing.
The image there, which is from NICM, which is the National Institute of
Complementary Medicine, relating to acupuncture and some acupuncture
research related to the treatment of symptoms of cancer, but NICM is a great
example of some of those partnerships that we're developing, and I'll touch on
that again in a moment.
Scott was keen to have a look at our ERA performance. This is the raw
data that underpins what was submitted to ERA. You'll see across the three,
the first one essentially a trial ERA, but ERA 2 and ERA 3, growth in the
number of researchers, weighted publications up to 11,400, you can see the
various categories of income.
The number of disciplines as defined by four-digit FOR assessment, that
hasn't changed a lot from ERA 2 to 3, that's a good thing, we don't want to be
spreading ourselves too thinly by increasing the number of disciplines that are
being assessed under ERA, so that's great. All the other indications are very
strong, particularly total citations per indexed article, which has gone up
significantly, as has the weighted pubs per FTE per annum, up to almost 2. I
think they're very strong indicators for us.
We're cautious about where we'll end up with ERA this year, but I know
that in Scott's view we'll see an improvement in the number of world-class or
above areas of assessment. Remember last time 70% of our research was
assessed at world-class level 3 or above, and we're looking to improve on that.
The base data certainly gives us some confidence around that.
These are just the trend lines on the various indicators to see we
continue to do well. Australian competitive grant income, which we've done
very well in in recent years, is going to be increasingly difficult, difficult in the
next few years. The ARC and the NHMRC, notwithstanding the Medical
Research Fund, will be under pressure. Hence our need to look for diversified
sources of revenue to support research.
I mentioned internationalisation earlier, and the Global Futures
Internationalising UWS Strategic Plan is out that Linda has been working on again a great process, I think, of consultation across the university. This is
taken from the plan and replicating what we're doing with Securing Success,
but it touches on all the things we're trying to do. We are trying to increase
the number of inbound international students, and although we've seen some
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tapering this year, we're confident that will build in 2016 and beyond.
We want to significantly increase outbound student numbers, and I'm
pleased at the number of initiatives. Just today I signed off on travel
arrangements for a group of students going to Africa from the School of
Humanities and Communication Arts. That's great. I'm seeing more of that
sort of activity and I want to see it build for the university. Our partners
overseas are expecting to see our students come for short- or long-term stays,
so we need to participate in that in order to encourage exchange the other
way.
We need to work on our curriculum to internationalise the curriculum.
And of course it's partnerships that are the core. If we want to move away
from agent-based recruitment, then we need to start looking at those
partnerships. I've spent a lot of time in the last 18 months, and I'm about to
leave next week to Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan again to sign
relationships and to forge and strengthen some important partnerships for us.
It's not simply about student exchange and staff exchange, it's equally about
research, and we have had groups of our staff travelling overseas, particularly
earlier this year to India, to both Chennai and to Chandigarh to work with our
university partners there on some research activity. So I'm very pleased about
where the plan is for internationalising UWS.
This of course is an illustration of that. This is the relationship with the
Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. This is a very significant relationship
for us. We're looking to develop some joint facilities at Westmead with NICM.
And of course the opportunity to sign that agreement in front of the Chinese
President and the Prime Minister has been - as you can imagine, everywhere I
go in China we show these photographs and that's very handy. You would be
surprised the number of people who get photographed in front of that
photograph.
I did want to mention the New Colombo Plan. I think this is a great
success story and we have to congratulate the Government for getting on with
it and rolling out the funding to do it. This is a shot of our four New Colombo
Plan scholars that went overseas, a great group of our students who went to
Japan and to Hong Kong in that very first round where we picked up four out
of the 40 scholarships on offer nationally. I was very proud to be at the
function with Julie Bishop where those students received their certificates.
They've spent their time overseas, their six months, and they've come back
and great ambassadors for the university and we need to see more students
with that sort of experience.
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Just to illustrate that we do have a presence overseas that we've built on
over many years, and there are two particular relationships in Asia that have
been long-term relationships for us. This is a graduation ceremony last year at
the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City. This has been a longstanding
relationship for the university. Even before this relationship began, we had our
nursing relationship with the Hong Kong Baptist University, and that has been
a 25-year relationship, and I'll be in part next week in Hong Kong celebrating
the 25-year relationship with HKBU.
So we have had some successes
overseas, but they're modest in number and we need to build on them into the
future.
This gives you a sense of where our relationships are. So since January
we've hosted 21 international delegations already this year to the university
and we have signed 19 MOUs and articulation agreements. Everyone in this
room and everyone online will know that international partnerships are not
about signing MOUs and certainly not signing articulation agreements, it's
about what actually goes on beyond that. So we are very committed to
ensuring that these relationships are meaningful, that we will be able to meet
the expectations of our partners, we will be able to visit those institutions, we
will be sending our academic staff, we will be receiving exchange students, we
will be actively involved in these partnerships in research in collaboration in
terms of teaching as well as opportunities for students to move in both
directions, and this just gives you a sense of where those particular
agreements have been established.
Some of the partnerships - I mentioned the research workshops that we
had at Punjab University and IIT Madras earlier this year in India and we're
having some reciprocal joint workshops at UWS, the Chinese delegations that
I've led into China, into Vietnam, and we're exploring the opportunity of our
first offshore presence with a joint campus with UEH in Ho Chi Minh City, which
we're hoping will be established later this year and from there I hope it will
develop beyond the School of Business into other areas. We're certainly
talking about tourism and in cultural studies.
This just gives you a sense of this challenge around international student
numbers. As I said, we're down 7% this year in commencer load, and you can
see where some of those challenges have occurred in terms of the countries.
As I said, there are reasons for this. This is not because of a drop-off
necessarily in the attractiveness of UWS as a location, or Greater Western
Sydney as a location, it really reflects management of risk and how we've had
to in fact in some cases close down recruiting in some countries because of
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visa risk, and when you do that, it does have an impact on international
student numbers inbound. And this is commencing load by school. You get a
sense of the changes between 2015 and 2014. I'll put this set of slides up on
the web for people to have a look at if you would like.
Outbound mobility, these are modest numbers. As I said - and I quote
this figure quite a bit - on average in the sector, 12% of undergrad domestic
students have an international experience each year. We have a figure of
about 2.4%. So we need to address that, and I think we have in place the
sorts of programs that will do that. We may need to find almost certainly more
investment to make in that for students.
Global rankings - you've seen lots of announcements about it. I'm very,
very pleased, very fortunate to have become the Vice-Chancellor when all of
the hard work done over a long period of time, particularly in terms of research
and focused investment in research, is paying off in the international rankings,
the Leiden rankings that were announced just last week with a ranking of 259.
It's interesting to look at why we rank so well in Leiden. For example, in Life
and Earth Sciences we rank I think it's number 107 in the world, and when you
realise that Leiden University rankings are very much based on bibliometrics,
they're looking at citations and citation rates. So for UWS, in the top 10% of
world publications, in terms of high cited publications, the top 10% in terms of
citations, we have 10.8% of our publications in the top 10% in the world.
We're disproportionately well represented in that top 10% and that drives us
up in the rankings.
In the Life and Earth Sciences, 14.4% of our publications are in the top
10% of highly cited publications in the world. So you can see the reason that
we are doing well in the bibliometric-based ranking systems. Kevin Dunn is
our lead Dean on global rankings and he's deeply involved in helping us to
understand how to enhance our performance in the rankings, how to ensure
that we've provided the right data into those ranking systems.
We're very proud of being now number 56, I think it is, in the top 100
universities in the world under 50 and we're only 26 years of age. Under times
higher ed that's great. Top 400 in the world, and of course the QS rankings
we've done very well across a range of disciplines mentioned there, where
we're top 200 in the world and we're improving in the QS rankings. So overall
I think the ranking picture is strong for us and we're beginning to understand
better why, which is great, and we'll be able to focus our effort on ensuring
that continues.
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I've got to thank Joe Collins and the team in Advancement and Alumni.
I've worked closely with Joe over the last 18 months as we're out there to
attract more resources into our university foundation. The Advancement and
Alumni area is not simply about trying to find money from philanthropists, it's
equally about how we engage with our alumni, how we engage with the
corporate sector. So we do a huge amount of work in the engagement space,
and the Brian Lara Community Day, cricket day, was a great example of that.
Brian is going to become an ambassador for the university overseas. We're
looking forward to his contribution to lifting our profile particularly in the
subcontinent, and of course our work in connecting with alumni.
I should say - and I mentioned this yesterday at the professional staff
conference - I do encourage you to consider staff giving. I think it's a
wonderful way of contributing to the university to enable us to generate more
scholarship funding in particular - not simply for helping students in the
day-to-day needs of attendance at university, but also to enable students to
travel overseas and to participate more broadly internationally. So I think
there are many reasons for involvement in staff giving, and I would encourage
you to do that.
Now, a plan for growing Sydney. I wanted to put this slide up because it
highlights one of the reasons why Western Sydney is such an incredible focus
of attention, and again one of the reasons why coming here as a
Vice-Chancellor has been a great joy. Suddenly the world, literally in many
cases, but certainly the New South Wales Government and the Federal
Government, and political parties of all persuasions are interested in what is
going to happen in this part of the world over the course of the next 20 years
and beyond.
We will expect to see another 900,000 people living in Western Sydney,
according to the planning for greater Sydney, over the next 20 years, almost a
million people, most of those living west of the M7. So we've been very deeply
interested as a university in how we can ensure that we're producing the
graduates that are needed for the workforce requirements of Western Sydney
into the long term, but we're also interested in ensuring that the development
of Western Sydney is appropriate and that we do attract jobs into the region,
that we do see the economic development of the region that's necessary to
underpin that sort of population growth.
You can see the huge amount of infrastructure, the rail, the road
systems, that are already under way and some that are being planned - of
course Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek, which we've discussed
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extensively in the last 40 years, let alone the last 18 months, and what
difference that may or may not make to Western Sydney. We hope as it is
going ahead that it is an airport that truly delivers the sorts of jobs and the
sorts of industries that we need.
We have a great opportunity at the University of Western Sydney to
promote what we're calling an innovation corridor concept from Campbelltown
in the south-west up through Badgerys Creek, through Penrith and up to the
north-west, largely west of the M7, as an example of a corridor which will be
servicing a very substantial growth in population and where we believe there
are already substantial innovation hubs which can attract industry and can
support high-value jobs growth in Western Sydney. You just need to look at
the Werrington Park Corporate Centre that we opened on our Werrington
South campus just a few weeks ago as an example of the sorts of high-tech
facilities to attract business into Western Sydney, and we're very pleased in
the opportunities that we're already supporting in that building.
Parramatta is an important hub for the university, there's no doubt about
that - light rail; One Parramatta Square; the sort of future we're planning for
this campus at Parramatta Rydalmere, Parramatta South as we call it; what
we'll do with Parramatta North in the long term; the development that will go
on at Westmead, and I'll touch on that a little bit more in a moment;
opportunities that are emerging for us at Hawkesbury, the reinvigoration of
agriculture at Hawkesbury and what we can do beyond research, where we're
very, very strong.
Of course the enormous strengths we have at Campbelltown in health
and science broadly and medicine, and the strengths of our Bankstown
campus, our college at Nirimba, and our outreach centre at Lithgow. We
surround this economic development that will be so prominent in Australia over
the next 20 years, so we need as a university to be planning for our
involvement in that.
Now, we intersect with the region in a number of ways, and this list just
highlights some of those. I've mentioned the centre for Western Sydney and
REDI and the ideas labs; our smart business centres trying to support small to
medium-sized enterprises in western Sydney, of which there are 150,000, so
we're in the midst of that; the work I've mentioned in advancement in alumni,
the academy; the work that we do in our government relations area. We have
very strong connections, as you can imagine, with the 24 state members of
parliament in Western Sydney and the 12 federal members of parliament that
are here.
So we're closely engaged with them at the gateway and
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engagement.
One idea that we're very passionate about for Werrington South campus
is our science centre.
We have the opportunity to develop quite an
extraordinary science centre, not dissimilar to this one which is in Canada and
bigger than Questacon as an example of repurposing one of our buildings to
become what we think is an enormously important focal point for STEM
education in Western Sydney. We believe we could attract 150,000 primary
and secondary school students every year to what would be an enormously
important science, technology, engineering and mathematics centre on our
campus and we're talking to Federal and State Governments and others about
supporting us in this endeavour. Naturally on one of our campuses in close
proximity to our observatory, in close proximity to our research areas in
engineering and elsewhere, it's a great opportunity for us to develop on one of
our campuses a science centre.
We're doing an enormous amount in terms of our physical infrastructure.
This is just a few images - One Parramatta Square, which is emerging out of
the ground as we speak and it will be physically up by April next year and the
fit-out will be complete by October 2016, so that's exciting for us. We've just
signed off on the funding agreements for the Campbelltown clinical school.
This is a 5,000 square metre clinical school at the Campbelltown Hospital for
our School of Medicine - very similar to our Blacktown clinical school, but an
enormously important part of the growth for the next decade for our medical
program.
We have of course the John Phillips Library we opened a month or so
ago. It's wonderful to be able to pay tribute to the contribution of John Phillips
to this university with what is an extraordinary library in terms of the way it's
being utilised, and I do congratulate Sue and the team. It's great library to go
into, the students love it. There are a couple of thousand there every day and
couple of hundred there at 2 o'clock in the morning as far as I can tell. So
they're using it, which is great, and when you see the spaces, you get a real
sense of the way libraries are changing and again a great facility.
The Werrington Park Corporate Centre - if you haven't had a chance to
look at it, it's a great building. It will be filling up with tenants over the next
few months, another 5,000 square metre build. Architectus, who were the
architects for the corporate centre, were also the architects for One Parramatta
Square, so it's a great building.
Westmead - we have one of the most important pieces of real estate in
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Sydney without a shadow of a doubt. It's about 5 or 6 hectares adjacent to
the Westmead Hospital precinct and near the railway station there in
Westmead. This is naturally an artist's conceptual view of what Westmead
might look like. We'll be going to the market in the next couple of months to
seek out development partners for what is a very, very substantial opportunity
for commercial, residential and allied health, aged care and other
health-related uses. Of course the heritage precinct on that site is something
the university will maintain and we'll develop a health precinct there as well.
It's an exciting opportunity for the university and we're seeking partners
so that we're not selling real estate, we're looking at partners where we'll get
long-term annuity streams to fund more research and teaching at UWS, but it's
an enormously important opportunity for the university.
I did want to pay tribute to the work that is being done in IT - Kerry
Holling and his team, 1PSQ and the technology vision for 1PSQ, which I can't
go into today because I literally have no time, but it's an example I think of
the fabulous work going on to think about what the future is going to be in
terms of technology and the way it will engage with our students to enhance
the student experience. Virtual face to face, the core campus network - we
have spent a lot of money on improving the core campus network - and of
course we're working on streamlining student placements so that we can do
something that's extraordinarily important to us and something that is under a
lot of pressure. Zoom is mentioned of course, I'm sure people are using
Zoom.
I know Eric is here. The Whitlam Institute is truly one of our gems and
Eric does a fabulous job with the team. These are some of the stats for what's
going on. It's great to see Gough in that shot. I think the Whitlam Institute
post the death of the great man will be entering a new phase in its
development under Eric's leadership and I'm looking forward to participating in
that and I do congratulate the team on the work that is going on. And of
course the custodianship of the FOS is just part of that, as well as the Whitlam
exhibition and the Whitlam library.
Marketing and branding - I mentioned it a little while ago. We are going
to invest a lot of money, 10 million a year for the next three years, that is a
massive increase in our investment, because we want people to know what
we're doing and we want prospective students to be well aware of the quality
of what's happening at our institution. I just put up two of the books. One of
the things I have enjoyed reading so much of in the last year is the great
success of our students and staff publishing through the university's publishing
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house and doing so well in winning awards, and they were just two of them. I
did want to capture that because I think it's a great example, in the humanities
and communication arts, there's no doubt that we're a world leader, but yet
we're not necessarily making the world, at least locally to us, aware enough of
that. So we need to do more. And I will sort of forewarn you, in the lead-up
to open day we will be making a mark in Western Sydney. Keep an eye out on
billboards and look forward to seeing some interesting developments.
And Lakshmi of course, who is one of our great students and was of
course the New South Wales Young Woman of the Year and just an example of
the quality of our students.
Now, I've gone on longer than I should have. I want to answer your
questions in the 10 minutes I've got left, and thank you very much for
listening. I appreciate it.
(Applause)
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Now, we do have a little bit of time for questions. Have
we got any? I know I have some in front of me. Will I start with one? There's
one we made earlier. Will there be additional UWS-owned courses rolled out in
future online? This came from Kaye Shumack in the School of Humanities and
Communication Arts. Yes, Kaye, I think the success of the Bachelor of
Communications illustrates that, and particularly the great work going on in
that school and the quality of our program, we do need to look at how we can
develop our own programs in a fully online way as well as in a synchronous
delivery format. So yes, and I know that Denise will be working on that as
part of her revamp of our online programs. Are there any questions in the
room? Ragbir.
DR RAGBIR BHATHAL: Yes, one question here. You mentioned the UWS
Foundation. I was wondering whether it is possible for me to set up a
foundation for engineering, because I've got a lot of programs for engineering
students.
The University of Sydney has a physics foundation.
I was
wondering whether we could set up an engineering foundation. Is that
possible?
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Well, it's always possible, Ragbir. I think the foundation
under Danny Gilbert's leadership is a very powerful foundation board and at
the moment they've made the decision to focus on a target to raise $100
million for the university over the next few years with the aim of using that
money for scholarships. QUT have their learning potential scholarships, which
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is a very similar concept, and Peter Coaldrake, the VC there, has been leading
a great campaign to raise money for their scholarship fund.
We have over $40 million at the moment in our foundation, so we've got
a very focused strategy, and I think it's important that the foundation council
are very committed to that strategy and very committed to how we can build
that up, and that would naturally impact on engineering students as much as
others. So I wouldn't say no to it, but probably the timing of it is something to
talk to Joe Collins about.
DR RAGBIR BHATHAL: Okay, thank you.
VICE-CHANCELLOR: You also asked another question, what is the financial
situation of the university. I think I've answered that one. I think we're in
good shape, but there are challenges. Another question? Yes.
DR RAGBIR BHATHAL: In the invitation to attend this lecture you affirmed that
the university's greatest asset is its people, and that was really very reassuring
and indeed inspiring. Often employers and organisations keep count of KPIs
and outputs that are kind of akin to counting the eggs of the fabled golden
goose, whereas there's much less attention to the health and the thriving of
the goose that laid the golden eggs. I guess the question is do we know as a
university what important factors promote the thriving of or bring out the best
from the UWS staff and are we committed to and is there a reliable metric
really to measure the goose's health and thriving?
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Look, thank you. I do reaffirm the importance of our
people, no doubt about that, and the quality of our staff. That I'm reminded of
every day when I have an opportunity to meet with people around all of our
campuses and elsewhere. I think the My Voice survey I mentioned earlier,
that conversation we will have in about a month's time as an institution about
what that tells us about the culture of this organisation and where we're doing
very, very well. There are a number of indicators already which we do
outstandingly well and they relate to things like the extent to which the staff of
the university believe in the mission of UWS. I think it's something like 88 or
89% of staff believe in the mission of the organisation.
That's an
extraordinarily high figure and we're very proud of it and I know that the
Chancellor is proud of it.
So I think that as a set of indicators, the two-yearly My Voice survey that
we'll be doing will provide us with a rich set of data about the health of the
organisation in terms of our staff and the perception they have of the
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university, and I can assure you when we look at it and we openly discuss it,
where there are challenges we will deal with them and address them
collectively. So I do think we have opportunities to hear the voice of staff
where staff are concerned, but equally we're seeing some very, very positive
responses.
I must say the professional staff conference yesterday was a great
example of that. I've seen the Yamma feed on that over the last 24 hours and
people clearly are excited about having an opportunity to get together and
network and to listen to colleagues doing some very innovative things in the
university. Speaking of innovation, one of the things that we're capturing out
of the My Voice survey that Denise is working on is a measure of how
innovative we are as an institution, and we'll be using that as one of our
indicators based on a cluster of indicators in the My Voice survey. Other
questions?
NEW SPEAKER: I have a question from online from Anne-Marie. Where do
you see the threats to the innovations corridor and how are you planning to
deal with those?
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Well, I don't see any threats. I guess the biggest threat
is it doesn't get traction politically, and if it doesn't get traction politically, then
we won't be able to convince bureaucrats and others to help us to attract
industry in that part of Western Sydney. So I guess the challenge is getting
our political leaders to start to understand what we're about and to support the
notion.
From all the politicians I've spoken to, they do believe that what they'd
like to see is a bit more detail and a bit of an evidence base, and at the
moment we're doing a lot more work on trying to understand how this concept
might generate real jobs and what it takes in terms of a Federal or a State
Government to support it. So I think the threat really is if it's not picked up by
the political masters, but at the moment all the indications are at least
positive. Yes, Leanne.
LEANNE: I just have a question that was submitted online by Ian Wright from
the School of Science and Health. UWS has a major ongoing presence in
Parramatta. The Parramatta River Catchment Group is seeking to improve the
natural environment while the area is subject to intense redevelopment.
Would you consider becoming an ambassador for the Parramatta River on
behalf of UWS?
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VICE-CHANCELLOR: The answer is yes. It's nice to be put on the spot like
that. Look, I think it's hugely important that we as an institution, with the
great strengths we have across so many disciplines that are relevant to the
environmental sciences, understand the impact in our local environment as
much as in the global environment, and if we do understand and we do have
the expertise, we should be advocating for the health of our river system. So
of course I'd be very, very supportive of that. I think I saw some media on
this today about the health of the Parramatta River and the role our staff are
playing in bringing awareness to the health of the river publicly and to
politicians and others. So yes of course, it's a great idea. Thank you, I needed
something else to do. Hopefully there won't be a lot to do.
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you, vice-chancellor, for a wonderful address. I just
wanted to ask you if UWS had any specific strategy to increase our fundraising
activities and capturing more philanthropists to donate from a very low base?
It seems like whenever I read there are figures of $500 million here and there,
several hundred million dollars. Of course there are so many rich people, it
seems, around the place. Do we have any particular strategy to perhaps get
our fair share of the pie?
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Yes, I think that was - was it the Paulson gift yesterday
to Harvard, the half a billion dollar gift? It was the largest ever gift. Harvard
was in desperate need for resources. So I think I agree with some of the
online commentary about that particular gift.
Look, I know that Joe and the team are working on our approaches to a
number of philanthropists. This is a long-term process. I think we've got a
great story to tell, and increasingly I know that we're working on how to
sharpen the presentation that we make to foundations, to philanthropists, to
convince them that we are a cause worthy of significant investment.
Australian universities in recent years have had a few successes in
attracting large gifts, and certainly we're talking to a number of people capable
of making a large gift. So we are working on it. These things can be quite
challenging, but I'm very, very confident that we have a great story to tell and
I would hope we'll be able to announce some success in that space in the not
too distant future.
I must also pay tribute to one of our great philanthropic supporters in
recent years, William Chiu, who passed away in Beijing just a week or so ago.
William had donated a significant amount of money to the university, he had
supported scholarships for our students to travel to China, and he had personal
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philanthropic interests in eye treatments for people in impoverished areas of
China and taking Australian medical staff to China. So he was a great
philanthropist, a great supporter of the university, and it's very sad to see his
passing.
NEW SPEAKER: Thanks for the informative survey. This is a concern from the
coal face of undergraduate teaching which I think other people might share.
We take great pride in looking after the youth of Western Sydney in terms of
their undergraduate education and that means taking account of the fact that
many of them are first-generation university students and many of them come
from homes where English is their second language, and so on, and that's
often reflected in lower ATARs.
In catering to those students, we may end up reducing the overall level
of academic challenge in our courses, or at least creating a perception that
we're dumbing down our courses. If that's true, then it's doing a disservice to
the stronger students from this area. What can we do to prevent that from
happening and to guarantee to those students that they can still do a
high-quality degree at UWS where they will be academically challenged and
won't have to go to New South Wales or Sydney University in search of the
challenging education that they want?
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Well, I don't accept the premise of your question for a
start and I think it's really important to make it clear that the University of
Western Sydney should be a challenging place to study, it is a challenging
place to study, and it is the responsibility of our academic staff to ensure that's
the case. I'm sure Paul Wormell, who's here and is the Chair of Academic
Senate, would reflect the fact that our course accreditation and our quality
assurance arrangements should reflect that.
I gave a brief presentation to the engineering accreditation panel that
was here to accredit our engineering programs just a couple of weeks ago and
their report came in reflecting the quality of our engineering programs under
the Washington Protocol as the equivalent of any engineering program in the
country. So I think if you have concerns about the quality of programs, deal
with it and deal with it at the school level and ensure those things are
addressed. We need to ensure we can scaffold and support our students. And
I know that Denise is looking into this at the moment, looking at our academic
language and literacy programs across the university to ensure that we can do
as much as we can to provide support for students no matter what their
educational background is.
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We had a presentation from the Dean of Nursing and Midwifery at the
Board of Trustees the other day and she talked about the challenges for
students coming into nursing, for example, and the pre-testing that they're
doing and their program that they've put in place to support students who may
in fact have some academic literacy problems or challenges.
So the onus is on us certainly not to drop our standards, to ensure the
quality, to provide the scaffolding. I think it's fair to say we're not doing
enough and I think we need to do more. At the moment the emphasis is on
understanding what we're doing, how we could better coordinate it across the
university and invest in it. But I think the responsibility lies with our academic
staff to maintain those standards and to not feel for a moment at any time that
that isn't our fundamental obligation to our students.
So I'd encourage you to participate in ensuring that you can be very
proud of the programs at this university. And if you've got concerns, raise
them and do them through the school processes, through Academic Senate,
the programs that Denise will be looking on. I'm very confident that we stand
well against any university in this State.
Other questions people might have? Well, I think we have probably
exhausted our time. Thank you so much for coming along. Thank you so
much for being involved online.
(Applause)
VICE-CHANCELLOR: Thank you. Goodbye, livestream. And we cut.
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